Thermal Confinement in Plasmonic Nanoparticles under Generalised Pulsed Illumination

Abstract

Thermal confinement is a key parameter in photothermal applications, as it determines the spatial extent of the region affected by the generated heat. In this work, we develop a numerical treatment to quantify thermal confinement in spherical plasmonic nanoparticles under excitation conditions ranging from ultrashort pulses to the continuous-wave regime. The model combines generalized optical heating with a finite-difference solution of the transient heat equation and explicitly accounts for finite interfacial thermal conductance. To characterize the spatial distribution of heat, we introduce a thermal confinement radius defined from the temporal temperature envelope in the surrounding medium. We demonstrate that pulse duration acts as a highly effective, tuneable parameter to govern thermal confinement. Notably, we quantitatively show that finite interfacial thermal conductance can induce deviations of up to 20% in the spatial confinement radius and over 60% in the transient thermal construct under ultrashort excitation. By comparing the characteristic dimensions of representative targeting ligands with the resulting thermal-confinement length scales, we show how pulse duration can be precisely tailored to control target heating. These results provide a unified framework for predicting nanoscale heat localization paving the way for the rational design of high precision thermoplasmonic applications.